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Marathoner plans run to North Pole

Ray Zahab has conquered deserts and mountains and just about every other challenge an ultramarathoner can face. Now, he's preparing for a 750-km run to the North Pole, where Zahab faces unforgiving terrain and possibly polar bears. Just how he likes it.

Ultramarathoner Ray Zahab trains for the 750 km run to the North Pole with a tire strapped to his waist to simulate pulling a sled. (BILL GRIMSHAW FOR THE TORONTO STAR)

By CATHAL KELLYSports reporter

Tues., Feb. 5, 2008

CHELSEA, QUE.–The secret to Ray Zahab's powers of endurance may be housed in his mind, but it's written on his feet.

Standing barefoot in the living room of his apartment, Zahab's feet are twisted and bruised. The big toes are shaded purple. This is the result of injuries suffered nearly five months earlier.

Zahab is an ultramarathoner and adventurer of international renown. Last summer, essentially for kicks, he decided to run three legendary Canadian coastal trails in 10 days, including travel.

His first challenge was the Akshayuk Pass on Baffin Island, a 115-kilometre journey that Zahab managed in 27 hours.

During the course of the solitary run, he forded several rivers. On one crossing, he was forced to remain in the rushing, glacial water for an hour looking for a safe place on the opposite bank to emerge. By the time he got out, his feet were numb. Then he started running down the rocky trail.

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"I couldn't feel them at all and they're doing all these crazy things – turning over, bashing into rocks. So when I finally finished and they thawed out – oh my God! The pain, dude! It made me want to vomit," Zahab laughed.

Then he ran Newfoundland's East Coast Trail and B.C.'s West Coast Trail in the next week, meeting his 10-day target.

"I just don't think about the pain. I don't think about it and so it doesn't matter," Zahab shrugged. This may not be much of an explanation, but it is as close as Zahab can come to explaining what he does, other than just by doing it.

Zahab, 38, lives in Chelsea, a sleepy community about 15 minutes from downtown Ottawa. He has the lean build and bouncy gait of an elite runner. His voice is clear and carries, fitting for someone who now makes his living as a public speaker.

His story is widely celebrated in the area – an easygoing personal trainer and pack-a-day smoker who transformed himself into a running machine. The local coffee shop has a small shrine of Zahab clippings in one corner. The café Americanos are on the house.

"Part of Ray's eternally open tab," the proprietress winks.

Zahab competed in his first ultramarathon just four years ago. The discipline, which attracts only the fittest or craziest runners, involves racing beyond human endurance in locales specifically chosen for their inhospitable terrain. Zahab won several races while picking up E. coli in Niger and mystery parasites in the Amazon.

Soon he grew tired of racing without a purpose. He decided to meld his commitment to environmental concerns with his unnatural constitution.

Last year, that culminated in his most amazing feat yet. He and two running partners completed a 111-day, 7,000-kilometre crossing of the Sahara Desert. Logging nearly two marathons each day, Zahab defied sandstorms, blistering heat and a host of injuries to conquer the arid vastness. The run made Zahab a minor celebrity in Canada and a major one in running circles, with a starring role in a yet-to-be released documentary film, Running the Sahara.

Having bent the desert to his will, Zahab will now take on the opposite extreme – the Arctic.

Starting in late February or early March of 2009, Zahab and running partner Kevin Valleley plan to run 750 kilometres from Ward Hunt Island in Nunavut to the North Pole. Right now, Zahab is raising money for the enormous endeavour, which will highlight climate issues in Canada's north.

In a note, Valleley quoted the familiar traveller's maxim about the Arctic, that it is "a place that wants you dead."

They hope to complete the journey in 25 days. The Pole has been conquered many times, but never so quickly.

"I've never heard of anything like this. No one has," said Richard Webber, a renowned Arctic guide and the man who will oversee the planning for Zahab's mission.

A year out, Zahab has created a regimen designed to prepare him for the Arctic. He's starting slow – 15-kilometre daily runs on the icy roads, 30 on weekends. Once a week, he runs a local hill with a car tire strapped to his waist to simulate pulling a sled. The tire sits outside his apartment door. It's already been worn to its threads.

As the year goes on, the runs will increase in length. He plans to enter the Boston Marathon, though he admits he's never been a particularly fast distance runner. Just an unstoppable one.

The obstacles are legion. Few know them better than Webber, 48, who has travelled to the Pole more than a dozen times.

First, the logistics. A plane will have to be hired to drop supplies ahead of Zahab and Valleley. If the weather is inclement, as it has increasingly been in recent years, the plane can't fly. If the plane doesn't fly, the light-travelling runners don't eat.

They are not running on ground, but on an ice sheet covering the Arctic Ocean. The terrain is swelled and cracked by pressure ridges, caused when the moving ice collides. Much of the journey will involve scrambling over jagged ice hills. In places, Zahab will have to don a drysuit and swim through the near-freezing water for stretches of up to 100 metres.

The pack ice is also always receding to the south – a phenomenon called driftback. Webber once walked for 12 hours and found himself farther away from his destination at the end of the day. That treadmill effect will make the planned 30 kilometres per day seem much farther.

Zahab may be stalked by polar bears and will have to be armed with a shotgun.

"I don't even want to think about that," Zahab said. He means shooting a bear, not being eaten by one. Webber recalled that his wife once frightened off a bear lurking near her tent by roaring at it. Zahab could always try that.

The greatest danger is cold. When the journey begins, the temperature will be in the area of -60C.

"It's beyond belief. I can only describe it as a total lack of heat," Webber said. "There's no sun. It's just this red ball sitting on the horizon. It does nothing but act as a headlight."

This is where Zahab's unprecedented journey gets dicey. To cover those 30 kilometres a day, he will have to move quickly. But Webber warned that he will have to moderate his pace, lest he begin perspiring in the icebox conditions. "If you sweat, you die," Webber said.

Apparently, that's only one of several ways.

There is in these men – Zahab and Webber – a blithe dismissal of danger that is the result of having faced great hardship and survived.

"It's pretty safe actually," Webber said of the Arctic journey. "Only a couple of people have died in the last few years. People lose toes and fingers and stuff, but usually they don't die."

Webber has all of his toes.

Zahab is equally blasé about the risks. And equally sure that he will prevail. "I'm always thinking about it. About what I'll have to do. And about finishing."

Zahab illustrates his point by recalling the time before his first ultramarathon – the 160-kilometre Yukon Arctic Ultra. Shortly before the race, Zahab decided to run 80 kilometres as a final warm-up. After 60, he gave up running. As he neared his home, he was reduced to staggering down Chelsea's main street "like a zombie" towing a sled full of gear behind him.

"How the hell am I going to do this?" Zahab remembers asking himself.

During the race, he felt that same exhaustion creeping over him around the 80-kilometre mark. He sat down beside the path and thought about quitting.

"Part of me is saying, `You did your best. You just ran two marathons.' I thought I'd sit down for a while and wait for someone to pick me up. Then there's this other voice saying, `Just a little farther.' So I got up and started walking. I was repeating this mantra to myself, `Bloody stumps, bloody stumps,' because that's what I was going to end up walking on. I got to 90 kilometres and 100 kilometres. And I still wasn't really running. At 110, I came out the other side. At 120, my feet stopped hurting. Maybe I was dehydrated. Ten minutes after I finished, the pain was unbelievable. I willed myself to the end. That's what I did."

He also won the race.

"That moment has become a life philosophy. That's how I got through the Sahara Desert," Zahab said.

For Zahab, crossing a jungle or conquering the Arctic isn't a matter of physical endurance, it is a mental exercise. Though he is still shaping his body to the task ahead, in his mind, it's already done.

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